Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.
Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".
The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been proposed by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain. The corollary to this radical end to time itself is an alternative explanation for "dark energy" - the mysterious antigravitational force that has been suggested to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.
However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Senovilla, and colleagues have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured ...
via Is Time Disappearing from the Universe? (A Weekend Feature).
I love this idea. What would happen if you were standing where time disappeared?
5 comments:
Xeno, I was wondering recently-- if the universe is expanding, then win what "direction" is it expanding in?
As far as I understand, our concept of direction doesn't apply to space-- N,S,E,W.
The directions don't even apply every place on earth. If you are standing on the north pole, every direction is south. So, the idea is that they use landmarks like pulsars to create a 3d map of space. The map itself is getting bigger, it has seemed, but this may be an illusion because time is slowing down.
Interesting idea. When they say time disappearing, do they mean everything that reaches that point will cease to exist? or do we reach a point where everything stops moving away from the big bang?
Here's my sense of it... budding Einsteins please correct me... yes. There is no motion without time and nothing can exist that is not vibrating.... so the big bang set the entire universe in motion and one of the things created then was time. This may be simply because time is the effect you get by having dispersed differences in vibration rates of matter. Time doesn't really exist, it is a property of discontinuous vibration spread over distance. This is why time only goes in one direction: most of the universe is matter. To get time to work backward, you'd need a lot of anti-matter which is why I'm currently making some in my basement. Anyway, like anything else, without input, the system will run down. Because the time component of the space-time continuum is losing momentum, the universe seems to be accelerating.
The real problem with the general perception of the Universe is that most folks look at the Big Bang like it's over, as though this -- everything we know, including time -- is a //result// of the Big Bang. This is not the result, this IS the Big Bang. When the bang is finished, everything is finished, and that includes time.
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